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Strawberry, an agentic browser with built-in, personalised AI companions,
has raised $6 million led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with
participation from founders of Lovable, Supabase, and Hugging Face.
While enterprises often deploy AI via large
budgets and multi-year programs, freelancers, startups, and small businesses
need tools that work immediately. Many existing solutions require technical
expertise, disrupt workflows, or sit in standalone interfaces outside the
browser.
Strawberry embeds AI directly into browsing to create a no-code, adaptive
workspace that automates routine digital work so people can focus on
higher-value tasks.
Founded in Stockholm by a technical team
focused on bringing AI beyond developers, Strawberry streamlines tab switching,
data movement across tools, spreadsheet population, and message drafting, while
adapting to each user’s context and workflows.
Early users have built custom
assistants for competitive intelligence and sales prospecting, earning Product
Hunt “Product of the Day” and “Product of the Week.” The platform signals a
shift from generic enterprise AI toward personalised companions that make everyday
work more collaborative and usable.
Charles Maddock, CEO and co-founder of Strawberry, commented:
The browser is a tool most people use
daily and know intimately. By giving Strawberry powerful AI features out of the
box, we're making AI automation accessible to everyone. This funding helps us
continue our mission to help modern workers love what they do and skip their
busywork.
The
financing will fuel Strawberry's expansion across engineering and design to
support rapid iteration with its growing beta community.
Alongside
the financing, the company is rolling out an upgraded version with new
features, offering early access to select customers and expanding onboarding
monthly.
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Epiminds exits stealth with $6.6M to power AI-first marketing teams
Stockholm-based Epiminds,
which develops multi-agent AI systems to run marketing end-to-end, emerged from
stealth with $6.6 million in funding. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from EWOR, Entourage, and high-profile angels, including the former CMO of Booking.com.
Agencies face pressure
from both clients and operations as clients expect greater transparency, faster
reporting, and measurable ROI on tighter budgets, while internally, fragmented
data slows decisions, and AI adoption is uncertain. Traditional responses like hiring
more specialists, adding dashboards, or reacting after problems arise raise
costs and complexity without fixing core inefficiencies or preparing for the
future. Epiminds addresses these issues.
Founded
in 2025 by Google and Spotify alums, Elias Malm and Mo Elkhidir, respectively, the company builds multi-agent AI
systems that agencies can train and evolve. Its core product is Lucy, an AI
marketing manager coordinating over 20 specialised agents across reporting,
optimisation, budget pacing, bidding, and creative.
Agencies can onboard a
client in under 30 seconds and immediately deploy an AI team to run campaigns
end-to-end. Lucy and team not only surface insights but execute them, learn
each agency’s playbooks, and proactively monitor accounts to flag risks before
performance declines.
According to Mo Elkhidir,
marketers are increasingly expected to achieve more with fewer resources:
Lucy and her team take on
the busywork so that marketing talent can do their best work. This is not about
replacing creativity; it’s about giving it room to flourish.
Agencies using Epiminds
report faster onboarding, improved performance, reduced wasted spend, and more
time for creative and strategic work. The multi-agent system manages routine
tasks such as reporting and pacing, as well as audits, creative analysis, competitive
insights, and strategic planning. By linking insights to execution across
platforms, Lucy can increase output without additional headcount.
The product targets a gap
in the market. Legacy dashboards and optimisers are siloed and manual, while
point AI tools address narrow problems without coordination. Epiminds’
multi-agent approach provides an integrated, adaptive system that learns and
improves over time.
Elias Malm added:
Our
vision is simple. We're building Epiminds because we see where marketing is
headed. The future is about dynamic, agentic teams that analyse, plan, execute,
and improve in real time. Every marketer should have access to a 24/7 AI
workforce that frees up their time for creativity and strategy. Our goal is to
give them that future, today.
Looking ahead, Epiminds
plans to expand Lucy’s capabilities across more integrations, increase the level of
autonomy, and self-improving capabilities. Each new feature strengthens the
entire system, creating a network effect where every agency benefits from
smarter, more capable AI.
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14/10/2025 10:30 AM
Mark Cuban Would Still Have Dinner With Donald Trump
The billionaire investor campaigned for Kamala Harris, but thinks tech execs have a “moral imperative” to play nice with the president. Why? It’s good business.
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British HealthTech investor Spex Capital announces €30 million commitment to €100 million fund
London’s Spex Capital, a leading early-stage investor tackling global healthcare challenges through HealthTech solutions, today announced the first €30 million commitment to its flagship €100 million Venture HealthTech Fund.
The fund will invest globally in early-stage HealthTech startups, from Seed to Series A/B, with investments of up to €5 million.
Spex has partnered with EIT Digital and Penn Medicine/LGH, a leading mutli-hospital health system in the US that handles over 7 million patients each year.
Claudio D’Angelo, Founder and CEO of Spex Capital, said: “Healthcare faces immense challenges worldwide with ageing populations creating growing patient demand and systemic cost pressures. Our true strength is not just the volume of companies we see, but the unparalleled power of our distribution network to provide them with essential commercial and clinical validation.”
Several other funds have also entered or expanded within the European healthtech investment space in 2025, indicating sustained investor appetite for early-stage digital health and medical innovation.
London-based Meridian Health Ventures launched a €44.7 million transatlantic fund to back HealthTech startups scaling between the UK and the United States. Belgium’s Capricorn Partners announced a €51 million first close for its Health-Tech Fund II, targeting diagnostics, digital health, and life-science ventures. In France, M2care secured €26 million to accelerate venture studio activity in healthcare innovation.
Against this backdrop, Spex Capital’s €100 million Venture HealthTech Fund sits among the largest of the current European initiatives focused on early-stage health technology, highlighting growing institutional confidence in the sector’s potential.
Its partnerships with EIT Digital, Penn Medicine, and long-standing links to the NHS provide access to extensive validation networks, a factor often cited as a bottleneck in scaling health technologies.
In a year where European healthtech investment surpassed €4 billion in early 2025, according to EU-Startups’ sector overview, Spex Capital’s entry signals sustained investor confidence in digital health and medical innovation.
“The supply is strong, but the validation we deliver through our network is the game-changer. Digital HealthTech is key to addressing these challenges, and with this fund, our new partnerships, and a world-class advisory network, we are uniquely positioned to support visionary founders delivering transformative solutions worldwide,” added D’Angelo.
Founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Claudio D’Angelo, Spex Capital focuses on commercialising and scaling digital health and medical technology solutions across major healthcare delivery systems worldwide.
The company also announced the appointment of Lord Markham, former UK Health Minister, as Chair of the Board. He has extensive experience across the public, private and voluntary sectors, particularly in the venture space where he co-founded a HealthTech business, Cignpost, which grew from €0 to €350 million turnover in 1 year.
Lord Markham, Chairman, said: ”I’m delighted to join Spex Capital at such a pivotal moment for HealthTech. This scale-up fund will unleash groundbreaking startups. I look forward to working with Claudio and the team as we accelerate the development and adoption of technologies that improve patient outcomes and reshape healthcare delivery globally. “
EU-Startups previously covered the firm in February 2023, when Spex Capital first announced plans for its €100 million HealthTech fund.
London-based Clove, a new challenger in
personal finance and wealth management, has emerged from stealth with a $14
million pre-seed round led by Accel. The round also saw participation from Kindred Capital, Air Street Capital, and angels, including Barney Hussey-Yeo (Cleo), Patrick Pichette (via Inovia Capital), Erez
Mathan (GoCardless), and Gideon Valkin (ex-Monzo, ClearScore).
The FCA estimates that people who
receive financial advice may be up to 10 per cent wealthier in subsequent years than
those who do not. To narrow the advice gap and support market growth, it has
introduced regulatory changes to encourage investment and innovation.
In the
UK, 13 million mass-affluent individuals hold £3.8 trillion in investable
assets, including more than 3.7 million open to professional advice with over
£50,000 to invest; a further 7 million adults with £10,000+ in cash savings may
be missing out on long-term investing benefits.
Clove is building a financial
institution for how people live and work today, aiming to make money management
and advice accessible, affordable, and personal. The company combines human
advisers with AI to scale high-quality, personalised guidance and automate
administrative work, helping to close the advice gap.
Co-founder and CPO Alex Loizou said everyone should have access to high-quality financial advice. He added that Clove aims to reshape the economics of advice by combining human expertise with AI to make planning more accessible, affordable, and effective for young professionals, entrepreneurs, growing families, and those beginning to plan for retirement.
Clove will use the pre-seed funding to expand its
team and platform ahead of a planned full launch in 2026, subject to FCA
authorisation.
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From student storage idea to global logistics platform: the story behind Stasher’s succes
Sometimes the most compelling startup ideas are born from simple, everyday problems that demand a tech-first fix. Take two UK founders who bootstrapped through COVID and are now the global leader in the highly competitive space of luggage storage. UK startup Stasher.
During COVID, they built systems that now onboard hundreds of locations monthly without meetings. They've expanded from 1,000 to over 8,000 locations across more than 1,000 cities and 80 countries, and hit profitability during the summer and 100 per cent YoY growth, while their US competitors (like Bounce, backed by a16z) burn through much more cash. I
I spoke with founders Jacob Wedderburn-Day and Anthony Collias to learn how they did it, and ultimately how UK founders can still build category leaders without following the Silicon Valley playbook.
From student flat to global platform
The business started when students kept knocking on the co-founder's King's Cross door, asking to store bags for the summer holidays.
According to Collias, after uni, he was living between Euston and King’s Cross, and Wedderburn-Day was still at UCL, which had a startup programme.
They’d both realised they didn’t really want to go into corporate graduate schemes — Wedderburn-Day had done a stint with the government and had a job offer from the Bank of England.
Collias recalled:
“I’d done an investment-banking internship and hated it — long hours, smart people doing boring work. At the time, I was living with my brother, who was at City University.
Between us and our friends, people were always asking, ‘Can I leave my stuff at yours for a couple of weeks?’ You know, getting kicked out of student halls, going travelling, that sort of thing. Jake would often leave his bag with me, too.”
The duo decided to put the idea in the UCL’s Hatchery startup incubator program.
Refining the model: from homes to hotels
The duo took some time refining their idea.
Wedderburn-Day shared:
“At the beginning, it was kind of 'Airbnb for storage.’ You could store your stuff in someone’s house for a day, a week, or a month. But we soon realised that was a bad idea — too much friction for what you could charge.
We also realised everyone was using it as left luggage, not self-storage. They just wanted to leave their bags for a few hours or a day, not months. We didn’t know how to price one day versus one month — they were completely different things.”
So they narrowed it down to same-day storage, and saw it made more sense to work with local businesses.
According to Wedderburn-Day, “they were already open, had spare space, and liked having people come in. “That’s how the business model evolved — from 'store anything anywhere' to a clear left-luggage service run through shops and hotels.”
Scaling through marketing and digital infrastructure
Left-luggage offerings are nothing new - walk through any tourist precinct and you’ll see stores offering left luggage services.
But according to Collias, “a lot of those standalone locker stores — especially in places like Barcelona or Madrid — are becoming oversaturated."
"Ten or twenty years ago, if you opened the first few, you made a killing. But now, in some cities, there are 40 or 50 of them, and the economics don’t add up.
Most of those operators aren’t experts in online marketing, and it’s not worth running ads for just one or two locations."
Stasher has developed a platform that connects travellers with trusted storage spots — including hotels, shops, and lockers — across cities worldwide, allowing them to drop off their luggage for a few hours or several days. One thing they discovered is that 90 per cent of luggage storage is booked on the same day, making it on-demand urban logistics rather than planned infrastructure.
With Stasher, users can easily search, book, and pay online for a convenient storage location for specific dates and times through the website. Once booked, travellers simply “stash” their bags at the chosen location and collect them later.
In addition to short-term storage, Stasher also offers a luggage shipping service, enabling users to send their bags directly to their next destination. Collias contendst:
“We can solve a lot of the problems those small storage shops face. They have the physical presence; we have the digital infrastructure. Combine the two and you get real synergy.”
Further, he asserts that platforms like Slasher have the advantage because we can spread the marketing costs across hundreds of sites. For customers, that means more choice — they can compare all the nearby options instead of relying on chance.”
Winning in a crowded market
Wedderburn-Day shared that to win in a crowded market, “You have to nail three things: product, price, and distribution.”
“Product is tricky because you’re working with fragmented partners — shops, hotels, different setups — but smart lockers are helping with consistency.
We also like hotels because they’re used to handling guests’ belongings professionally. Our pricing strategy aims to be the best-value option.
Lockers have to maximise revenue per square metre, but we can offer lower prices and still profit thanks to scale.”
Data-driven expansion
Stasher is now active in about a thousand towns across cities globally. Early on, it picked places based on search volumes, tourism, and common sense — “like, obviously, downtown New York will have demand.” But another metric is Airbnb density.
According to Wedderburn-Day, numerous short-term rentals result in a large number of bags. With its own data, the team can now base expansion on where people are searching. He shared:
“We get thousands of bookings and tens of thousands of search queries a day, so we can see demand patterns in real time.
If a location has lots of searches but few conversions, we know we need more or better supply there. It gives us a really rich picture of global demand, and helps us grow intelligently rather than guessing.”
In terms of customer acquisition, Stasher’s biggest channels are partnerships and search.
According to Collias, partnerships make perfect sense because travel is time-specific.
“Think Airbnb hosts whose guests need storage before or after check-in. They already have the customers who need us.” Search – a mix of organic and paid — is the other big one. And when people search “luggage storage,”
It’s a location-based query, so Maps is crucial too. In terms of revenue, hosts charge a fixed fee per bag per day. It varies by geography and partnership type, but for most major partners, it’s roughly a 50/50 revenue share. Wedderburn-Day asserts that the economics are solid:
“We’ve been profitable for the last few months. We do have seasonal fluctuations — summer is strong, winter is slower — but the team's global reach means it's always summer somewhere, and overall, the business is safe and cash-flow positive.
The unit economics are very healthy. Growth just depends on how aggressively we choose to reinvest.”
Flywheel style growth
In terms of growth, Wedderburn-Day muses that “People assume you just pour money into ads, but that’s not how it works."
Our growth is more like a flywheel: A bit more demand lets us add more supply; more supply attracts more demand. Hosts generate visibility — more pins on Google Maps, more signage, more reviews — which boosts traffic.
That improves our economics, so we can invest more in marketing. It’s a conventional marketplace loop: demand → supply → demand.
The bigger you get, the better your product and conversion, so you can scale without burning cash.”
From startup to scaleup
Now Stasher is at a turning point — shifting from startup to established company. Collias asserts, “When we talk about raising money now, it’s not about survival; it’s about how we can use capital to grow intelligently. There’s still huge room for expansion.”
Once you know where it makes sense to invest, you can shift from a variable-cost to a fixed-cost model in key areas, which is a powerful way to scale a marketplace sustainably.
Significantly, Stasher achieved its goals with less than £5 million in funding — partly by learning how to do "more with less". The duo cold-emailed their way from there to their first investor (Big Yellow Storage CEO), securing their first game-changing partnership with Premier Inn shortly after.
“Too many founders build to exit”
Ultimately, Collias believes that Europe needs to stop selling itself short.
“Too many founders build to exit. We need bigger swings and the patience to stick around.”
Wedderburn-Day asserts that US companies have easier access to capital and higher valuations, this makes it easier for them to acquire European startups.
“Take Airbnb. One of the teams they acquired in Europe had incredibly capable founders. One of them stayed on as Head of Growth for years.
Clearly, he could’ve built something great independently. But the ecosystem didn’t make it worthwhile to stay independent.”
Collias believes:
“We need to make it make sense for founders to build long-term European champions, not sell early because of the system."
In many ways, Stasher’s journey offers an example to many startups. With just £2.5 million in total funding, the company built a profitable, global business in a fiercely competitive market — not by outspending rivals, but by outthinking them. It’s proof that capital efficiency can outperform capital abundance, and make it possible to turn a simple student idea into a worldwide category leader.
Lead image: Stasher co-founders Anthony Collias and Jacob Wedderburn-Day. Photo: uncredited.
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Europe on the Move – Bits & Pretzels 2025 Sends a Strong Signal for Entrepreneurial Spirit and Unity [Sponsored]
Under the motto “Connecting Europe”, Bits & Pretzels once again underscored its ambition to be the central platform for founders, investors, and decision-makers in Europe. Coinciding with Oktoberfest, Munich became a hotspot for innovation, networking, and entrepreneurial spirit – with over 7,500 participants from more than 70 countries, top-tier speakers from around the world, and a clear message: Europe must come closer together, become bolder, and harness its innovative power with greater determination.
Europe needs more ambition, risk culture, and open markets
International voices shaped the debate on the future of the European startup ecosystem. “Connecting Europe was more than a motto for us – it was a promise. This year’s Bits & Pretzels has shown what’s possible when Europe’s founders work together on a shared vision,” explained Andy Bruckschlögl, co-founder of Bits & Pretzels.
Skype founder and Atomico CEO Niklas Zennström called the founders the gamechangers of Europe and urged for more courage, independence, and assertiveness. Raycho Raychev, founder and CEO of space startup EnduroSat, advocated strengthening democracy through bold technologies rather than angry tweets. He also called for open market structure: “We still do not operate in a truly open market in Europe. Instead of focusing on transparent competition, many players remain stuck in outdated management structures that slow down innovation and progress.”
The time for founders and bold technologies is now
Despite ongoing economic uncertainties and global tensions, one thing was evident this year: Europe is growing closer together. Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Katherina Reiche, emphasized that crises offer great opportunities for startups, as the pressure for change on established companies increases and innovation becomes the key to sustainable success.
“Bits & Pretzels is, more than ever, the platform for European innovation. The feedback from the community confirms it: Europe wants to – and, even more importantly – Europe can! And we will do everything we can as a platform to create even more space for collective progress,” said Bernd Storm van’s Gravesande, co-founder of Bits & Pretzels.
Matchmaking with impact: How Bits & Pretzels connects founders and investors
Formats such as the Startup Expo, CIO AI Summit and Investor Summit made European collaboration tangible at Bits & Pretzels. At the Startup Expo, more than 200 startups from across Europe showcased their innovative ideas and solutions. In the Matchmaking Area, founders and investors met in curated one-on-one sessions, supported by experienced networkers who acted as personal guides and fostered valuable connections.
“Our mission is to build bridges – between countries, between capital and ideas, between startups, investors, and corporates,” said Felix Haas, co-founder of Bits & Pretzels. “These bridges were visible everywhere at Bits & Pretzels 2025.”
European Pitch Contest: Sitegeist wins with a smart construction platform
A major highlight was the final round of the European Pitch Contest. The first prize went to Munich-based robotics startup Sitegeist, which has developed an intelligent platform that automates repetitive construction site tasks – improving safety and efficiency. Founder Lena Pätzmann celebrated the win: “Our mission is clear: we want to save infrastructure. Now we have the attention, and we’re ready to get things done.”
Venture capital is a critical driver of innovation, and in recent years, Malta has carved out a place for itself on the European map of startup investment. Its strategic location, international business links, and government-backed initiatives have made the island an increasingly attractive base for both founders and investors.
The country welcomes several events throughout the year to push innovation forward, such as the Malta Startup Festival happening on 22-24 October 2025, which brings together founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders to celebrate entrepreneurship, or the EU-Startups Summit, taking place on the island for the third time in a row on 7-8 May 2026, attracting Europe’s most promising startups and venture capital firms, reinforcing Malta’s growing reputation as a Mediterranean hub for creativity, technology, and innovation.
In this article, we highlight 12 investors anchored in Malta that are actively supporting local and international startups. Their approaches vary, but together they demonstrate the growing maturity and global reach of Malta’s innovation economy.
Apeiron Investment Groupis the private investment firm of entrepreneur and investor Christian Angermayer. Headquartered in Sliema with teams also in New York, London, Berlin, and Abu Dhabi, the firm applies a global multi-strategy approach with a primary focus on the US.
Apeiron invests both directly in innovative companies and as an anchor LP with minority GP stakes in emerging asset managers, whose funds collectively manage around $5 billion in external capital. The group has a strong emphasis on life sciences, fintech, and frontier technologies, guided by a mission to support bold founders and emerging managers shaping a future where technology enables longer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives.
GO Ventures is the corporate venture arm of GO plc, Malta’s leading telecommunications provider with over 500,000 customers. Established to back technology-driven startups, the fund provides capital and strategic support in exchange for equity, focusing on innovative solutions that extend beyond traditional telecom boundaries.
With the mission of “Helping Great Ideas Grow”, GO Ventures offers startups not only financial investment but also access to deep sector expertise and an extensive network of national and international contacts. By leveraging the infrastructure and resources of GO plc, it creates unique opportunities for founders to test, scale, and connect with corporate partners across Malta and beyond.
Growth Box Ventures is a Malta-based early-stage venture capital firm with a portfolio of over 57 companies and 62 investments to date, including five successful exits. The fund primarily invests at seed and pre-Series A stages, focusing on fintech, personal finance, gaming, and lead generation sectors where Malta has global relevance.
Founded by entrepreneurs with a track record of starting, building, and exiting ventures, Growth Box offers much more than capital. Its hands-on approach focuses on empowering management teams through strategic advice, performance-driven guidance, and value-adding services. By combining financial investment with commercial insight, Growth Box Ventures helps ambitious founders reduce risks, accelerate growth, and scale internationally.
Ikigai Ventures was founded by Maltese entrepreneur Eman Pulis, best known as the driving force behind SiGMA Group. The seed-stage fund invests globally, but with strong ties to Malta through its founder and LP base. Ikigai Ventures backs early-stage startups across gaming, fintech, and frontier technologies, seeking bold founders with the potential to reshape their industries.
Beyond capital, Ikigai supports founders with access to tech hubs in Belgrade and Noida, a network of more than 10,000 industry contacts, and bi-annual mentorship retreats aligned with major SiGMA events. The team includes experienced operators and investors who provide strategic guidance, operating expertise, and international exposure to help startups scale.
Malta Enterprise, the country’s national economic development agency and headline sponsor of the EU-Startups Summit, operates a range of funding schemes that complement private investment. Its Start-up Finance and Business Start programmes offer non-dilutive capital to early-stage businesses, helping them develop products and reach market readiness. These instruments are designed to fill gaps in traditional venture financing and reduce risk for both founders and co-investors.
While not a VC firm in the traditional sense, Malta Enterprise plays a vital role in the ecosystem by catalysing private investment. By lowering barriers for young companies, it enables more startups to reach the stage where they can attract venture funding, making it a cornerstone of Malta’s support infrastructure.
Launched in 2024, Malta Venture Capital (MVC) is a €10 million government-backed fund with offices in Sliema. Its mandate is to co-invest alongside private investors in high-growth digital and technology-driven businesses, providing the capital needed to strengthen Malta’s innovation pipeline. Backed by Malta Government Investments, MVC represents a significant step in formalising the local venture ecosystem.
The fund is sector-agnostic but has a strong focus on technology-enabled solutions. By supporting startups at early stages, MVC aims to create long-term value for the Maltese economy while helping companies position themselves internationally. Its arrival has filled a gap in Malta’s funding landscape and made institutional capital more accessible to founders.
Optimizer Invest is a venture capital firm founded in Malta in 2012 by a group of Scandinavian IT entrepreneurs. The firm focuses on early-stage investments in online businesses, including fintech, digital marketplaces, and gaming-related ventures. With offices in Malta, Stockholm, and London, it combines capital with operational expertise to help founders build scalable companies.
Since its launch, Optimizer Invest has made over 25 investments, achieved three IPOs, and completed more than 30 M&A transactions with over €1 billion in merger value. Its portfolio includes companies such as Skilling, The Game Day, and other fast-growing digital businesses, reflecting its focus on creating long-term value in technology-driven sectors.
PeakBridge is a Valletta-based venture capital firm focused on FoodTech, investing from seed to Series B in companies developing scalable and protectable technologies across areas such as AI, ingredients innovation, and alternative proteins. The fund targets startups addressing major challenges in the global food system, with climate and health impact at the core.
With a team spread across seven countries, PeakBridge combines FoodTech investment expertise with deep operational and financial experience in the agri-food sector. As a member of the Edmond de Rothschild Private Equity partnership, it works closely with leading food corporates, investors, research institutes, and FoodTech hubs worldwide to support portfolio companies and drive systemic change in food.
PEVCA Malta (Private Equity & Venture Capital Association – Malta) is the national association representing the country’s private capital industry, bringing together fund managers, direct investors, institutional investors, family offices, and professional service firms. Acting as a central hub for Malta’s private equity and venture capital ecosystem, the association promotes collaboration, knowledge exchange, and sustainable growth while advocating for a regulatory framework that supports innovation and entrepreneurship.
Its members invest across various sectors, including startups, technology, sustainable finance, and innovation, with examples such as TUM Invest, which focuses on property development, automotive, and healthcare. By fostering a stronger capital-raising culture and serving as a bridge between investors, founders, and policymakers, PEVCA Malta plays a key role in positioning the island as an attractive hub for private investment and venture capital activity.
Qamar Venturesis an investment initiative founded by Alexandre Dreyfus, the entrepreneur behind blockchain and sports pioneers Chiliz and Socios.com. Based in Malta, the firm plans to invest €10 million to boost the country’s digital landscape across media, technology, entertainment, and sports. With over two decades of experience spanning technology, gaming, and blockchain, Dreyfus brings a global perspective and a proven track record of innovation, including building the world’s first Fan Tokens and a fan engagement ecosystem through Chiliz.
Qamar Ventures aims to “illuminate the future” by backing transformative ideas and fostering innovation that bridges local and global markets. Its mission centres on driving Malta’s growth in digital industries through strategic investments, acquisitions, and partnerships, empowering the island’s entrepreneurial ecosystem while promoting a digitally connected and forward-looking economy.
Ubunto Ventures is a MedTech-focused investment initiative tied to MedTech World, the Malta-based global healthtech conference. The firm invests in startups developing innovative medical technologies, aiming to improve patient outcomes while also generating strong commercial returns. Its positioning within MedTech World ensures that portfolio companies benefit from a wide international network.
By combining capital with access to the broader MedTech World ecosystem, Ubunto Ventures creates visibility and growth opportunities for its startups. Its focus on health innovation makes it one of Malta’s few sector-specific investors, helping position the island as a player in global healthtech.
VentureMax Group is a Sliema-based investment firm focused on startups and disruptors in the iGaming sector. Founded in 2016, the group combines capital with industry expertise to support both early-stage ventures and established businesses aiming to scale.
In addition to investing, VentureMax develops its own brands and works closely with portfolio companies to drive growth in digital entertainment and technology. Its strategy is centred on building the next generation of iGaming leaders while strengthening Malta’s position as a global hub for the industry.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
Arbio, a startup out of Berlin applying AI to the service-heavy property rental sector, is announcing its €31 million Series A funding round – bringing total funding to over €38 million.
The round was led by Eurazeo, with investors including AI-focused VC OpenOcean and previous investors Atlantic Labs and leading angels Philipp Freise and Justin Reizes (KKR), Johannes Reck and Tao Tao (GetYourGuide) and Din Bisevac (Buena).
Constantin Schröder, Arbio Co-founder and CEO, said: “Starting as operators ourselves, we’ve felt where the real pain for operating and managing holiday rentals lies. Therefore, at Arbio we get extremely excited about leveraging AI to change the fundamentals of a traditionally messy, service-heavy sector.
“With our involvement in existing holiday property managers we’re very particular about how we believe building and rolling out our platform delivers the highest value to home owners, so that ultimately travellers have a wonderful time exploring new places.”
Arbio’s Series A takes place amid a broader 2025 wave of European PropTech and travel-hospitality investments focused on automating property operations through AI.
In Germany, fellow Berlin-based player Buena recently secured €49 million to expand its AI-led property management platform and acquisition pipeline, signalling strong investor appetite for technology-first management models. SCALARA added €3 million to digitalise property workflows, while viboo in Zurich raised €3.3 million to scale its AI building-management system into Germany.
Arbio’s AI-native, full-stack approach to short-term rental operations stands out for integrating service automation, acquisitions, and cross-market scaling within a single system. The presence of both Arbio and Buena in Berlin, SCALARA in Brühl, and viboo expanding to Germany, highlights Germany’s growing role as a European centre for innovation in AI-enabled property management and hospitality technology.
Elise Stern, Investment Director at Eurazeo, said: “Arbio is pioneering the AI-native model in one of Europe’s largest and least digitised service sectors. By combining technology, data, and operational excellence, they’re redefining what property owners and guests can expect. We believe Arbio will become the category leader in the multi-billion-euro holiday rental management space, and we are excited to support them in this ambition.”
Founded in 2022 by childhood friends Constantin Schröder and Paul Bäumler, Arbio emerged from their own frustrating experiences as Airbnb travellers across the globe. What began as a mission to create consistent, high-quality guest experiences has evolved into addressing the core operational challenges facing holiday home owners and management companies across Europe, a potential $20 billion market.
There are 6.5+ million alternative accommodation properties in Europe, but Arbio says managing them is stuck in the 20th century. Owners face unpredictable returns, endless hassle, and poor reviews, while guests experience increasing inconsistency. Traditional property managers claim they can help owners self-manage their properties by relying on legacy software, creating a patched-up, inefficient solution.
To solve this problem, Arbio is building an AI-native operating system that acts as a full-stack property manager. Thanks to AI workflows, it automates distribution, accounting, operations, guest communications, and dynamic pricing – allegedly delivering higher revenues, lower costs, and peace of mind for owners. Guests benefit from personalised stays, faster responses, and standardised quality.
This technology-first approach has enabled the following growth metrics:
1,000+ units currently under management across DACH
10x revenue growth in the last two years
30+ strategic acquisitions completed through its dedicated M&A team
With the Series A funding, Arbio plans high-speed expansion across Europe, targeting hundreds of thousands of property owners who would benefit from its AI-native management platform. The funding will also accelerate their acquisition pipeline and enhance its AI capabilities.
The Serbia-born CEO of Nvidia-backed UK AI voice startup PolyAI has a nice way with words.
The US is the “new Rome” which “demands loyalty”, says Nikola Mrkšić; meeting his wife during a spell interning at Credit Suisse generated “very high ROI activity”; while PolyAI’s client base is “heterogeneous”.
Mrkšić is talking to Tech.eu in PolyAI’s commodious and new-looking basement offices (albeit sparsely occupied as it’s Friday and WFH Friday mania persists in the UK) in London.
PolyAI, which was founded in 2017 and valued at nearly $500m, is often cited in top ten lists of UK AI startups, a triumph which was given a boost last month when Nvidia’s man of the moment CEO Jensen Huang named it as one of its eight star startups (along with the likes of Wayve and Revolut), it would be investing in.
Serbian heritage
A namecheck by arguably the most famous businessman on the planet might have given the 30-something co-founder and CEO a moment to reflect on how his life had changed since his 1990s childhood growing up in troubled Serbia, in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, its parent nation.
Mrkšić, who is slight in stature and softly spoken, says: “Serbia has had to find its own way after stumbling for quite a long time, which meant for my parents’ generation, it was a very like jaded feeling.
“And I think there was a reflex to push your kids into hardcore education so that they can rely on themselves and maybe be less dependent on the system, which had crumbled in front of their eyes.”
Growing up in Serbia, Mrkšić attended a Serbian maths high school (the equivalent of a UK grammar school) and was one of seven out of eight applicants who received a full scholarship to Cambridge University.
“We’re not designed to crack Cambridge interviews the way that many elite schools in Britain are”, he wryly points out.
His links with Serbia, where PolyAI has an office, are still strong, returning three or four times a year to visit friends.
Cambridge University
Serbia might be his home country, but London is where PolyAI was founded, seven years after Mrkšić came to the UK to study computer science and maths at Cambridge University.
He could have quite easily pursued a banking career, interning at Credit Suisse, where he met his wife during his undergraduate years.
But an encounter with Blaise Thomson, the founder of speech-related AI startup VocalIQ, a Cambridge University spinout, convinced him to join the startup as its first employee.
During this time, Mrkšić also met his Taiwanese co-founders: Tsung-Hsien Wen (ex-Google), PolyAI’s CTO, and Pei-Hao Su (ex-Facebook), PolyAI’s SVP, engineering, at a Cambridge University group focused on spoken dialogue systems.
He says: “We were in high demand by the research labs. What frustrated us is that we didn’t really see automated voice improving.”
What PolyAI does?
PolyAI has developed AI voice assistants for call centres which guide customers through enquiries, handling millions of calls, which can, some say, sound indistinguishable from human voices.
PolyAI has worked with linguists to build voice assistants that reflect human speech patterns and the voices can be tailored by accent, tone and vocabulary.
The tech can complete many tasks a customer service rep can, including taking payment information as well as names, addresses and account numbers.
PolyAI uses its own proprietary large language models as well as frontier model companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
The early years of PolyAI, pre ChatGPT, were tough, says Mrkšić, given they were three researchers-cum-callow-entrepreneurs trying to commercialise a product that few in the business world knew about.
Back then, the scrappy startup, looking for commercial traction, speculatively approached London pub owners to experiment with its tech.
Competition and challenges
While PolyAI is making headway, automated call handling remains a turn-off for some people, partially due to historic bad experiences with rudimentary voice tech.
Furthermore, complex requests often require empathy and judgment that only humans can provide, experts say.
A McKinsey survey found that 71 per cent of Gen Z respondents (rising to 94 per cent for baby boomers) believe live, human calls are the quickest and easiest way to reach customer care and explain their issues.
Meanwhile, earlier this year Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said its AI voice approach led to “lower quality” and Klarna flipped from its AI-first policy to ensure customers always had a human to talk to.
Despite these challenges, it is easy to see why tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have tried to crack automated call handling, as the call centre software market is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
Current startup competitors include the likes of Germany’s Parloa and US startup Rasa.
ChatGPT moment
The ChatGPT moment was a big boon for PolyAI, says Mrkšić, quadrupling inbound leads.
Now, PolyAI works with major businesses, amid growing enterprise 24/7 demand for call centre support, which suffers from high attrition rates.
These include Las Vegas casinos, Hilton and Marriott hotel chains, US delivery service FedEx, and the financial institution Unicredit.
Given the co-founders' stellar CVs, funding has not been a problem, says Mrkšić. Last year, PolyAI raised £50m in funding, valuing it at close to $500m.
The Series C was led by investors Hedesophia and NVentures, the VC arm of Nvidia, with participation from existing investors including Khosla Ventures and Point72 Ventures. It has previously raised $66m from investors.
It is understood that PolyAI will announce a fresh funding round later this year, likely to include fresh funds from Hedesophia and NVentures.
Relationship with co-founders
“I am the talker”, says Mrkšić, when asked how the founders divvied up the roles. He says he loves all the key functions of being CEO: fundraising, hiring and selling.
That said, he admits his management skills are a work in progress.
The three co-founders, he says, are still happily professionally married. “We are really close,” he says, but points out that there are clear demarcation lines.
For example, he says it was decided from day one that Mrkšić, a tech aficionado, would not write a line of code or voice any strong technical opinions.
He says: “I am deeply technical. I still very much enjoy the moments where I have time with product and tech teams to talk about things.”
In between running PolyAI, he also hosts an AI-infused podcast, discussing news and AI breakthroughs.
US footprint
Mrkšić has adopted a kind of second identity, as an American, as PolyAI’s revenues have grown in the US, which now accounts for roughly 80 per cent of its revenues, compared to 20 per cent in Europe.
He calls the US the “new Rome” which “demands loyalty”.
He says: “If you want to be successful in the US, you are going to use American spelling and work American hours.”
For example, when in London, he says he works from 10am to 1am UK time to fit in with the US.
He now spends a big chunk of his time in the US, where PolyAI has New York and San Francisco offices, meeting existing and new clients, meeting investors, and attending conferences.
The future
As AI becomes more commonplace and the frontier model becomes more effective, the tech, in theory, should improve.
PolyAI, which employs around 270 people, reported revenues of £11.9m in the year ending January 31 2025, up 75 per cent on the year, according to Companies House figures. Revenues were boosted by snapping up new customers and expanding existing contracts.
And what about PolyAI’s plans for the rest of the year?
Mrkšić says: “We have been growing the team like mad. So everything from accelerating on that and platform changes and announcements which are going to come towards the end of the year, opening up the ecosystem a bit more.”
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India’s Airbound bags $8.65M to build rocket-like drones for one-cent deliveries
Italy-based GEVI, a company specialising in
vertical micro-wind turbines, has closed a €2.7 million seed round led by 360 Capital and CDP Venture Capital (through the Acceleratori Fund,
MiSE Co-Investment Fund, and ToscanaNext Fund), with participation from
NextSTEP One.
GEVI develops a modular, distributed,
low-noise micro wind turbine with a smart vertical axis that adapts to wind
conditions in real time via AI-driven blade control.
Designed to overcome limitations of
conventional systems, the blades adjust every hundredth of a second as an AI
system analyses wind data, solves fluid-dynamics models, and optimises output.
The architecture targets higher efficiency (reported up to +60 per cent annual
energy versus leading VAWTs), improved reliability and safety (active blade
control reducing loads by up to 80 per cent in strong winds), and broad
applicability thanks to a compact form factor (rotor height 3m, diameter 5.4m).
Intended for household use and local
micro-grids, it operates from wind speeds as low as 3 m/s with a nominal output
of 5 kW, and is designed to work alongside solar in urban, industrial, and
rural settings.
According to Emanuele Luzzati, founder, CEO,
and head of engineering, the funding enables GEVI to bring a distributed,
modular wind solution to locations where photovoltaics and conventional wind
are less effective, accelerating the transition from prototype to scalable
industrial product.
The support we
have received allows us to transform our technology into a scalable, industrial
product, accelerating GEVI’s contribution to the energy transition. Thanks to
the trust of our investors, we will be able to give strength to a radical idea:
turbines that learn from the wind and interact with nature, transforming into
energy what was previously dispersed.
Founded in 2022 by Emanuele Luzzati (CEO),
Edoardo Simonelli (COO), and Soufiane Essakhi (CTO), GEVI operates a ten-person
team across an R&D office in Pisa and a commercial/operations office in
Rome. Alongside the round’s close, Giuseppe Imburgia was appointed General
Manager to lead the scale-up with the founders, driving industrialisation and
international growth.
The funding will be
used to industrialise the product, including starting serial turbine production,
and to advance technology by enhancing the AI control system and introducing
new turbine versions.
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Maia Ventures closes fresh €55 million fund to connect Italy’s world-class food industry with startups in AgriTech and FoodTech
Maia Ventures, an early-stage Milan-based AgriFoodTech fund, today announced the launch of its first fund at €55 million to back 20 to 25 companies, with initial ticket sizes ranging from €0.5 to 1.5 million.
The Limited Partner base brings together institutional investors, such as the European Investment Fund (EIF) and CDP Venture Capital Sgr, alongside private investors, which include leading Italian food corporates and their family offices, such as Teseo Capital sicav-sif, Cereal Docks (through its CVC Grey Silo Ventures), Andriani, among others.
“What excites us is the calibre of science and operator talent now converging on topics such as food-as-medicine, innovative ingredients, and resilient supply chains. As an early-stage partner, we aim to be among the first institutional believers, helping Founders connect with industry leaders and lay the foundations for scale”, said David Bassani, Founding Partner at Maia Ventures.
Earlier this year, Nordic Foodtech VC announced a €40 million first close for its second fund – slightly smaller in scale than Maia Ventures’ €55 million launch, but similarly focused on early-stage innovations transforming the food and agriculture value chain.
By connecting Italy’s established food industry with early-stage innovation at the intersection of food, health and sustainability, Maia may help stimulate further venture activity within Italy’s ecosystem.
“By combining deep industry know-how with a strong industrial network, Maia is best positioned to identify and invest in solutions to problems that matter, instead of in solutions in search of a problem. This, we believe, is the key to tangibly accelerate the much-needed evolution of our industry,” said Andrea Galassi, Founding Partner at Maia Ventures.
Founded in 2024 by Andrea Galassi and David Bassani, Maia Ventures is active in supporting alternative investment funds in the AgriFoodTech space. As the exclusive advisor to Maia Ventures, the firm supports Praesidium S.A. in sourcing, structuring, monitoring, and enhancing the investment opportunities.
The fund is currently fully operational with six investments to date and is targeting a final closing in the coming months.
The team behind Maia Ventures is made up of former Founders, investors, industry operators and scientists, and is supported by a technical advisory group that includes representatives of some of the leading AgriFood universities and corporates.
“We invested in Maia Ventures because it connects Italy’s world-class food industry with breakthrough AgriFoodTech innovation. The team’s deep expertise and robust network enable them to identify high-impact DeepTech solutions at the intersection of nutraceutical, food and health, where long-term value and systemic resilience are established,” said Claudia Pingue, Head of Tech Transfer Fund of CDP Venture Capital.
Maia aims to pursue both financial and impact objectives by building a healthier, more efficient, and more resilient food system for all. The Italian VC is positioned as a value‑add partner, bridging Italy’s well established food industry with the most promising startups emerging from leading accelerators, universities and the broader AgriFoodTech ecosystem.
Maia believes that the current downturn in AgriFoodTech funding is generating a unique window of opportunity for investors who focus on structural global shifts in the space, tackling the most pressing industry challenges.
Within this opportunity, Maia places particular emphasis on the convergence of food, health and sustainability, supporting innovations that deliver both individual well-being and systemic resilience.
Retailers
often operate fragmented systems that don’t communicate, leading to
overselling, delayed or lost orders, peak-period bottlenecks, and heavy manual
data entry across e-commerce, warehouses, and finance. These issues waste staff
time and frustrate customers.
Patchworks
addresses this by connecting e-commerce, ERP, POS, PIM, CRM, CDP, and fulfilment, so stock, orders, and customer data stay in sync. Prebuilt connectors and
real-time flows help retailers adapt to market shifts, reduce peak failures,
and resolve issues faster. Teams can pinpoint bottlenecks (e.g., where an order
is stuck) and trigger actions without code, while a broad partner network
across ERPs, warehouses, and couriers supports reliable delivery.
Growth
is powered by a partner-first model, often described as its “flywheel”, that incentivises technology and
agency partners to refer and deliver at scale, providing global coverage and
ensuring the product evolves with current retail tech needs. As enterprises
move off rigid legacy systems, Patchworks is becoming a preferred option for
connecting commerce and supporting composable, MACH-based stacks.
The new funding will
advance the platform to help retailers respond more quickly to changing
consumer behaviour and market conditions. Ongoing AI investment will enable
smarter automation and allow LLMs to query Patchworks data, reducing manual
work and freeing teams to focus on growth. Patchworks also plans a North American expansion, which will strengthen support for global brands operating across regions.
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Isentroniq raises €7.5M to tackle the wiring bottleneck and scale quantum computing
French quantum hardware startup Isentroniq closed a
€7.5 million funding round led by Heartcore with participation from OVNI
Capital, Kima Ventures, iXcore, Better Angle, Epsilon VC, as well as the support
from Bpifrance and the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the France
2030 program.
Quantum computing could
transform sectors such as medicine, energy, and logistics, but meaningful
progress requires millions of qubits due to error-correction overhead.
Superconducting qubits are promising, yet scaling is constrained by cryogenic
wiring that adds heat and bulk; beyond roughly 100 qubits, systems hit thermal
and spatial limits. Building to 1 million qubits with current approaches would
demand massive facilities and tens of billions of euros.
Isentroniq targets heat, cost, and space bottlenecks to enable up to 1,000×
more qubits in existing dilution refrigerators, with a long-term goal of
reducing the cost of a 1 million-qubit system to about €50 million. The company
operates a fabless model—designing its architecture and outsourcing fabrication
to specialised partners—to accelerate time to market, limit capex, and ensure
industrial-grade quality.
Today, wiring is the #1 bottleneck to scale superconducting quantum
computers. Our mission is to turn it into an accelerator,
Isentroniq was co-founded by Magnard, a superconducting-qubits expert with a
PhD from ETH Zurich and former lead architect at Alice & Bob, and ThéodoreAmar, a second-time founder with prior roles at Bain & Company and Hilti.
The announcement comes as major players, including Google, IBM, Amazon, IQM,
Alice & Bob, and Rigetti, pursue roadmaps toward 100,000 to 1 million
qubits.
The new funding will support the development of Isentroniq’s wiring
technology, team build-out, and partnerships to deliver a plug-and-play
solution for scaling quantum systems.
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Ex-unicorn team unveils Afori from stealth with €4M to power AI for insurance brokers
Afori, a new AI platform purpose-built for insurance
brokers, announced its official launch out of stealth alongside the closing of
a €4 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Yellow and Booom. Individual backers include industry leaders Christopher Lohmann (founder of Mulberry Ventures, former CEO of HDI and Gothaer), Chris Leifeld (founder of Thinksurance), and Garrett Koehn (CIO, CRC), as well as AI pioneers Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI), Alex Rinke (co-founder and co-CEO, Celonis), and Mehdi Ghissassi (formerly of Google DeepMind).
Founded in 2025 by Fabian Wesemann
(wefox co-founder) and Sergi Banos (wefox’s first employee and former CTO),
Afori is an AI platform for insurance brokers that automates back-office work
starting in the email inbox. Integrated with Outlook, it understands insurance
processes, turns unstructured communications into structured workflows, and
enables brokers to focus on client relationships and growth.
Addressing a key industry pain point,
administrative work that takes over 60 per cent of broker time, Afori’s initial
product, an AI sidebar, turns emails and documents into cases with structured
tasks and delegates partial automations to insurance-specific AI agents within
the inbox, saving users about an hour per day on average.
According to Fabian Wesemann (CEO), Afori was developed in close collaboration with brokers to
reflect their terminology and workflows, ultimately giving them more time to
focus on client advice.
By combining Agentic AI with deep industry expertise,
we’re creating a product that integrates seamlessly into brokers’ daily
workflows and delivers real, tangible value from the very first day,
added Sergi Banos, CTO.
The pre-seed round will
accelerate product development, expand integrations, and drive German market
adoption, with the platform debuting at DKM 2025 in Dortmund this month.
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Arbio raises $36M Series A to redefine property management
Arbio, a pioneer in the service-heavy property rental sector, is announcing a $36 million Series A funding round, bringing the company's total funding to over $45 million.
Arbio is a full-stack AI-first services company in the property management and hospitality industry, which sits right at the intersection of AI-enabled services and roll-up plays, with the ambition to become the go-to brand for short-term rental in Europe.
I spoke to Constantin Schröder, founder and CEO of Arbio, to learn more.
From the hockey field to proptech
Schröder was born and raised in Cologne, a smaller German city. For most of his life, he was a professional field hockey player:
“I played in the German Bundesliga and had aspirations to make the national team. That was everything I did back then—through high school and into university.”
He studied business at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, a university renowned for producing founders behind companies such as Zalando, HelloFresh, and JOKR.
“It wasn’t one of the big schools,” he says, “but a lot of founders have come out of there. It gave me a solid grounding in business and entrepreneurship.”
A solution for a personal pain point
After graduating, he reconnected with his oldest friend, Paul Bäumler who’d previously founded two companies: a maths-learning platform in high school that he sold when he was just eighteen, and a corporate social responsibility startup letsact, which he launched during university and sold after graduation.
They decided to take a break and travel.
“We started in Europe, then went to Mexico and South America,” he says.
It was during that trip—in Mexico—that the idea for Arbio was born:
“We stayed in maybe ten or twelve Airbnbs,” he remembers.
“Some were beautiful, but the overall experience was often disappointing: unreliable hosts, inconsistent standards, no 24/7 check-in or support.
We realised that most small hosts couldn’t be on-site or manage round-the-clock communication. There was a clear pain point—but also a big opportunity, because Airbnbs still offered more flexibility and value than hotels.”
Modernising an outdated industry
There are 6.5+ million alternative accommodation properties in Europe,but managing them is stuck in the 20th century. Owners face unpredictable returns, endless hassle, and poor reviews, while guests experience increasing inconsistency.
Traditional property managers claim they can help owners self-manage their properties by relying on legacy software, creating a patched-up, inefficient solution.
Turning a passion project into a dynamic, scalable business
Back in Berlin, the founders of Arbio started digging into the local Airbnb market.
“At first, it was just a passion project,” he says.
“We took over a small hosting business from someone who owned a beautiful apartment in central Berlin with great reviews. We did everything ourselves—cleaning, guest communication, even setting up baby beds for families.
I remember scrubbing bathrooms with toothbrushes to get between the tiles!”
Their hands-on approach paid off.
“Within a few months, we’d significantly increased that property’s revenue,” he says.
“We introduced technology like a dynamic pricing algorithm, which made a big difference. That’s when we realised there was huge potential to improve both the guest experience and host operations.”
The team noticed that most small property managers charged the same rate year-round—maybe slightly higher at Christmas — and didn’t sync pricing across booking platforms. It therefore built an algorithm that collects vast market data — how others price similar properties — and correlates it with live search volume and demand on Booking.com, Google, etc. It updates prices daily to optimise occupancy and revenue.
“That product immediately increased income for property owners while maintaining guest satisfaction. It showed us technology could genuinely uplift both sides.”
Since then, Arbio has grown quickly, raised venture capital and venture debt, expanded into Germany, Austria, and the UK, and manage over a thousand units.
AI as Arbio’s engine
Arbio's AI-native operating system that acts as a full-stack property manager. Thanks to AI workflows, it automates distribution, accounting, operations, guest communications, and dynamic pricing, delivering higher revenues, lower costs, and peace of mind for owners. Guests benefit from personalised stays, faster responses, and standardised quality.
AI is core to Arbio, as Schröder stresses:
“We’re a technology-first, AI-first company. Everything revolves around product development that simplifies owners’ and guests’ lives.”
He explained that AI enables the company to build and iterate faster while empowering teams to develop their own internal tools.
According to Schröder, AI underpins three key areas: pricing optimisation, using machine learning across vast datasets; operational orchestration, where large language models automate communication between guests, owners, and service providers; and internal efficiency, allowing every department to solve problems autonomously.
“Long-term, I think 90–95 per cent of what’s now done manually in property management can be automated,” he added.
“Of course, physical tasks like cleaning and maintenance will still need people for quite a while—robots aren’t climbing Berlin staircases yet!”
This technology-first approach has enabled 1,000+ units currently under management across DACH, 10x revenue growth in the last two years, and 30+ strategic acquisitions completed through its dedicated M&A team.
Balancing tech in property management
Property management has traditionally been a very people-facing industry—hotel front desks and so on. Now there’s a tech wave—digital check-ins, automated communication. However, Schröder believes that software alone doesn’t solve hospitality.
“Many solutions are pure tech — they sell AI software to property managers or owners. We take a different approach: being both a property-management company and a software builder.
You need human touch to deliver real quality.
Software can’t comfort a guest stuck in the rain who can’t check in. So we use AI to enhance—not replace — people. We extend the capabilities of those who have deep hospitality knowledge, enabling them to manage more properties efficiently.”
He imagines a future where a team of 30–40 people can manage tens of thousands of units — “because we’ve automated the right things while keeping local teams for hands-on needs.” Arbio believes in a vertically integrated model—not just matching homes to guests, but guaranteeing quality.
Schröder believes that Airbnb can’t always do that; “they have too much inventory. And with AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT or Google’s travel results, I think we’ll see new discovery patterns and more niche travel platforms emerging.”
According to Schröder, last year they began heavily building out their product with AI to orchestrate all communication between guests, property owners, and service providers. He asserts:
“Our mission is to build “the one home for holiday homes,” where property owners who struggle with operations—and guests who struggle with reliability—both find a solution.
When guests tell us they had a wonderful honeymoon at one of our apartments, or an owner says we’ve made their life less stressful—that’s what drives me.”
Competing with hotels, not residents
Importantly, addressing concerns about gentrification and housing shortages, particularly in cities like Barcelona, where short-term rentals face criticism, Schröder clarified that Arbio operates under a completely different model. “We don’t use residential properties at all,” he explained.
“We only operate in spaces with commercial licenses, designed from the start for hospitality use—just like hotels”
He emphasised that this represents “a tiny fraction of the total market” and doesn’t affect local housing availability.
“Housing shortages come from financial speculation and poor city planning, not regulated holiday-home use,” he said.
“We see ourselves competing with hotels, not residents.”
With the Series A funding, Arbio plans high-speed expansion across Europe, targeting hundreds of thousands of property owners who would benefit from its AI-native management platform. The company's technology-driven approach to scaling operations positions it to handle this expansion while maintaining its lean operational model.
Eurazeo led the funding, with investors including Open Ocean and previous investors Atlantic Labs and leading angels Philipp Freise and Justin Reizes (KKR), Johannes Reck and TaoTao (GetYourGuide) and DinBisevac (Buena), amongst others.
Elise Stern, Investment Director at Eurazeo, said:“
Arbio is pioneering an AI-native model in one of Europe’s largest and least digitised service sectors. By combining technology, data, and operational excellence, they’re redefining what property owners and guests can expect.
We believe Arbio will become the category leader in the multi-billion-euro holiday rental management space, and we are excited to support them in this ambition.”
The funding will accelerate Arbio's acquisition pipeline, enhance its AI capabilities, and support expansion into new European markets where vacation rental management remains fragmented and owners are underserved.
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Maia Ventures launches €55M Fund to back early-stage agrifood tech entrepreneurs
Italy-based Maia Ventures, an early-stage
agrifood tech fund, has launched its first fund valued at €55 million to back 20–25
companies, with initial tickets ranging from €0.5 million to €1.5 million. Limited partners include
institutional investors such as the European Investment Fund (EIF) and CDPVenture Capital Sgr, alongside private investors including leading Italian food
corporates and their family offices (e.g., Teseo Capital sicav-sif, Cereal
Docks via Grey Silo Ventures, Andriani).
Maia, an Article 8 SFDR fund, targets both
financial returns and impact, aiming to build a healthier, more efficient, and
more resilient food system. The firm positions itself as a value-add partner,
linking Italy’s established food industry with high-potential startups from top
accelerators, universities, and the broader agrifood tech ecosystem.
The team comprises former founders, investors,
industry operators, and scientists, supported by a technical advisory group
with representatives from leading agrifood universities and corporates. Maia
views the current agrifood tech funding downturn as an opportunity to back
solutions aligned with structural shifts and pressing industry needs, with a
focus on the convergence of food, health, and sustainability.
The
fund is managed by Praesidium S.A., a Luxembourg-based AIFM, and advised by
Maia Advisors SRL. It is fully operational, has completed six investments to
date, and is targeting a final close in the coming months.
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Former unicorn team to launch German startup Afori with €4 million to bring AI-powered efficiency to insurance brokers
Afori, a new AI platform purpose-built for insurance brokers out of Berlin, today announced its official launch out of stealth alongside the closing of a €4 million pre-Seed funding round.
The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Yellow, Booom, insurance industry leaders including Christopher Lohmann (Founder the Mulberry Ventures, ex-CEO HDI and Gothaer), Chris Leifeld (Founder Thinksurance) and Garrett Koehn (CIO CRC), and recognised AI pioneers Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI), Alex Rinke (Founder & Co-CEO Celonis) and Mehdi Ghissassi (ex-Google DeepMind).
“Insurance brokers still spend the majority of their day tied up in administrative work, a burden that is only growing heavier with increasing regulation,” said Fabian Wesemann, Co-Founder and CEO of Afori. “At Afori, we’ve worked hand-in-hand with brokers to design a solution that speaks their language, understands their processes, and gives them back the most valuable resource of all: time to advise their clients.”
Afori’s pre-Seed round situates the company within a broader wave of European InsurTech and AI-driven automation funding in 2025. Several startups have attracted investor attention for applying AI to insurance workflows – from claims processing to broker enablement. London’s ClaimSorted raised yesterday €11.4 million to modernise claims handling, while Paris-based Seyna secured €10 million to expand its broker-dedicated platform. Fellow French startup Orus closed €25 million to grow its SME-focused insurance services, while Denmark’s Leaf raised €1.7 million for AI-powered business insurance and pension advice.
Similarly, Berlin’s muffintech secured €3.5 million to build AI tools for insurers and brokers, a particularly relevant parallel given Afori’s broker-centric approach.
Together, these examples indicate a steady capital flow into specialised, AI-enabled insurance platforms across Europe. Afori’s focus on brokerage-specific automation aligns with this trend, positioning it as part of a broader movement to streamline back-office functions and enhance productivity within regulated financial services.
“Unlike generic productivity tools, Afori’s AI is trained on real broker use cases and insurance-specific terminology,” added Sergi Banos, Co-founder and CTO of Afori. “By combining Agentic AI with deep industry expertise, we’re creating a product that integrates seamlessly into brokers’ daily workflows and delivers real, tangible value from the very first day.”
Founded in 2025, Afori is tackling one of the biggest pain points in the brokerage industry: the overwhelming administrative workload. Brokers spend more than 60% of their time on back-office tasks, leaving little room for strong client relationships and business growth.
Afori’s first product, the intelligent AI sidebar for brokers, addresses this challenge head-on by automatically transforming emails and documents into cases with structured tasks, and delegating to the insurance specific AI agents partial automations directly within the inbox of a broker, saving brokers using the product on average one hour per day.
Co-founders Fabian Wesemann and Sergi Banos bring deep insurance expertise, previously having Founded and been first employee & CTO at InsurTech unicorn wefox.
“We believe the leading services firms of the future will be those that embrace AI to rethink how they work and drive better outcomes for their clients,” said Zeynep Yavuz, Partner at General Catalyst “We are backing a team with domain expertise, deep understanding of insurance brokers’ pain points, and the vision to lead AI transformation in insurance services.”
The €4 million pre-seed funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand integrations, and drive market adoption in Germany. Afori will debut its platform at DKM 2025 this month in Dortmund, Germany.
Afori will debut its platform at DKM 2025 (October 28–29, Dortmund, Germany). Visitors will have the opportunity to experience the AI assistant live and speak directly with the founding team.
Gothenburg-based energy innovator Liquid Wind is charging ahead with its next-generation eFuel production facility, securing €3.6 million in support from the Swedish Energy Agency’s Industriklivet programme.
The backing will fund pre-engineering for what is set to be one of Europe’s largest eMethanol plants, based in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden.
The funding forms part of the EU-backed Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), with Industriklivet designed to accelerate Sweden’s green industrial transformation. The grant was awarded based on the project’s alignment with national emissions reduction goals and its potential to enable significant fossil fuel substitution in hard-to-abate sectors such as maritime shipping, aviation, and the chemical industry.
“We are pleased to receive the Industriklivet support for our project in Örnsköldsvik. It represents a strong commitment from the Swedish government that not only accelerates the transition to fossil-free eFuel production in Sweden but also sends a powerful signal to international investors and offtakers. It’s a clear endorsement of our vision to scale local and resilient eFuel solutions in Europe,” says Claes Fredriksson, CEO and founder of Liquid Wind.
In the 2025 funding landscape, Liquid Wind’s grant sits at the strategic pre-engineering phase of Europe’s clean-fuel push. It aligns with a broader pattern of investment across the continent, where companies such as Spark e-Fuels (Germany) secured €2.3 million to advance e-fuel technology, Tulum Energy (Italy) raised €22.9 million to scale low-carbon hydrogen production, and OXCCU (UK) closed a €23.7 million Series B to expand carbon-to-fuel operations.
Meanwhile, Spain’s Green Bunkers obtained €5 million to deploy sustainable maritime fuel infrastructure.
Together, these initiatives reflect a diversified but converging trend toward industrial-scale renewable fuels across Europe – with Liquid Wind’s project underscoring the complementary role of public-sector support alongside private capital in accelerating commercial deployment.
Founded in 2017, Liquid Wind is carving out a leading position in the European eFuel landscape. The company develops commercial-scale facilities that produce green methanol – synthetic fuel derived from renewable electricity and captured carbon dioxide.
Unlike traditional fuels, eMethanol offers a carbon-neutral alternative, critical for decarbonising sectors that can’t easily electrify.
The Örnsköldsvik project will be the second such facility for the startup but is expected to double the production capacity of its predecessor. Once operational, it aims to produce around 100,000 tons of eMethanol annually by combining green hydrogen (generated via electrolysis using renewable electricity) with approximately 150,000 tons of biogenic CO₂ captured from Övik Energi’s bio-powered combined heat and power (CHP) plant.
In doing so, it could displace an estimated 200,000 tons of CO₂e emissions each year.
In a demonstration of circular and collaborative energy systems, the site will be integrated with Övik Energi, a regional utility and long-term partner to Liquid Wind. The integration allows for not only efficient resource use but also establishes a resilient local supply chain for sustainable fuel.
“I am very pleased to announce our new collaboration with Övik Energi. We have already been working together for a few years, so we are glad that this new partnership has now come together. We see a very strong desire from customers and fuel users to transition to sustainable fuels, something our facility in Örnsköldsvik will contribute significantly to. Our new eFuel project is already underway, and we are looking forward to bringing it to reality,” noted Fredriksson.
The Örnsköldsvik plant, is expected to be a blueprint for scaling similar facilities across Europe. Its planned capacity marks a considerable step forward in the sector, especially as the green methanol market is forecast to explode – from a projected €3–5 billion in 2025 to as much as €20 billion by 2030, according to projections from the IEA, IHS, and the IMO. The chemical sector alone is expected to comprise 32% of this demand.
Roland Nordin, CEO of Övik Energi, added: “We’re thrilled that Liquid Wind remains dedicated to setting up large-scale eFuel production in Örnsköldsvik. We are better positioned than ever to contribute to the green transition, thanks to our ability to operate our combined heat and power plant entirely on renewable energy. Together with Liquid Wind, we are strengthening our sustainability initiatives in Örnsköldsvik and fostering the industrial collaboration that happens every day at the High Coast Innovation Park business cluster.”
As Europe ramps up its climate ambitions, Liquid Wind’s eFuel model – pairing renewable hydrogen production with local carbon capture – offers a replicable path to greener fuels at scale.
The European Union has set ambitious targets to phase out fossil fuels in line with its European Green Deal, aiming for climate neutrality by 2050 and at least a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 under the Fit for 55 package. These frameworks promote large-scale deployment of renewable energy, clean hydrogen, and sustainable fuels across transport and industry.
Through initiatives such as the REPowerEU plan, the EU also seeks to accelerate the transition away from imported fossil fuels, fostering domestic innovation in eFuel and carbon-recycling technologies – goals Liquid Wind could prove vital in.
EU-Startups previously featured Liquid Wind in a 2024 article detailing its €44 million Series C funding round, which focused on scaling commercial eMethanol production and expanding its network of industrial partners across Northern Europe.
Every enterprise runs on B2B transactions - the purchase orders, shipping notices, invoices, payments, and claims that form the heartbeat of modern commerce. When these flows align, shelves are stocked, supply chains move, and customers are happy. When they don’t, the cost is both immediate and compounding.
For decades, electronic data interchange (EDI) systems provided the backbone for these flows. Today, however, new layers of technology, from APIs and managed file transfer to event streaming and cloud-based ERP, have created a hybrid landscape that is faster but far more fragmented.
Each system captures part of the truth, but none can see the whole story. The result is a hidden loss that drains enterprise value every year.
The invisible cost of disconnection
Many organisations believe their current tools provide full visibility. Yet, in practice, most still struggle to reconcile transactions end to end.
Files move, APIs fire, and dashboards go green. But behind the scenes, purchase orders go missing, invoices don’t match, and payments stall without explanation.
The result is what experts increasingly call the assurancegap. This is the space between knowing something happened and proving it happened correctly and completely.
Across industries, that gap has measurable financial and operational consequences:
Between one and five percent of EBITDA is lost each year through chargebacks, deductions, and disputes.
Compliance teams spend weeks preparing audits because records cannot be reconciled across systems.
Modernisation projects stall because leaders fear losing visibility during migrations.
Partners and regulators lose trust when continuity cannot be demonstrated.
How confident are most enterprises that they could prove every transaction completed as intended?
Monitoring is not assurance
Most enterprises assume that their combination of monitoring and observability tools covers these scenarios. The problem is that these platforms only provide technical insight - not business assurance.
EDIgateways confirm delivery but purge records after 30 days.
APIplatforms show success codes but not whether transactions match downstream.
Observabilitytools highlight performance metrics but not whether shipments, invoices, and payments align.
The gap between activity and truth remains.
“In complex B2B ecosystems, visibility alone isn’t enough, ” writes AndrewMallaband. “Enterprises now need proof of continuity - the ability to demonstrate that every transaction completes, reconciles, and complies. ”
A new layer of assurance
This challenge has given rise to a new capability known as B2B flow intelligence, a unifying layer that provides cross-system visibility, reconciliation, and auditability.
It does not replace existing systems but overlays them to correlate, track, and prove the continuity of transactions across multiple technologies.
At the data layer, B2B flow intelligence correlates transaction identifiers, timestamps, and acknowledgements across systems to reconstruct an unbroken lineage from order to settlement.
At its core, B2B flow intelligence delivers:
Unifiedlineage - linking all data from order to payment across EDI, APIs, ERPs, and partner portals.
Contextual routing - sending exceptions to the right resolver with full traceability.
Immutable history - creating long-term, tamper-proof records for audits and regulators.
This combination turns reconciliation from a reactive burden into proactive assurance.
Industry snapshots
The effects of the assurance gap vary by sector, but the underlying cause is the same, fragmented visibility.
In retail, peak trading periods such as Black Friday reveal how fragile order-to-cash continuity has become. A single missing shipping notice can trigger millions in chargebacks and strained supplier relations.
In pharmaceuticals, a missing chain-of-custody record can delay shipments or regulatory approvals, disrupting both revenue and patient care.
In banking, complex payment modernisation programmes, such as the migration to ISO 20022, demand complete reconciliation across legacy and modern systems to avoid costly compliance breaches.
These examples highlight how a purely technical view of system health no longer guarantees business continuity.
What enterprises gain
Organisations implementing B2B flow intelligence are realising quantifiable outcomes:
Leaner operations - 50 to 70 percent reduction in reconciliation effort.
Margin protection - 1 to 5 percent of EBITDA safeguarded.
Modernisation with confidence - ERP and API migrations delivered on time, without data loss.
Stronger trust - partners, customers, and regulators share the same source of truth.
CFOs see measurable protection of margin. CIOs gain confidence that transformation programmes will not disrupt business continuity. Compliance teams eliminate the manual scramble before every audit. The value is enterprise-wide.
From visibility to proof
The adoption of B2B flow intelligence signals a broader shift across industries, from monitoring systems to proving outcomes. Monitoring shows that something moved. Observability shows how it moved. Assurance proves it moved correctly. That assurance is fast becoming a board-level priority. It protects profit, strengthens compliance, and restores trust across the digital supply chain.
A growing movement
Several enterprise platforms are now developing capabilities in this space, bringing together data correlation, lineage, and governance.
One example is meshIQ, which has extended its operational intelligence suite to deliver cross-system reconciliation and assurance for hybrid B2B environments.
While approaches may differ, the direction of travel is clear. Enterprises no longer just need to observe. They need to prove.
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“By women, for women”: London-based Unfabled turns community insight into retail success with €3 million
FemTech startup Unfabled out of London has just raised an additional €1.4 million for their women’s health platform, as well as expanding into 737 Boots stores across the UK – bringing total Seed funding to just over €3.3 million.
Among the investors is Arāya Ventures, founded by Managing Partner Rupa Popat and backed by British Business Investments (BBI). Notably, this is BBI’s first-ever commitment to a solo GP. Investment into Unfabled has been made from their Arāya Super Angel Fund, a community-powered model that mirrors Unfabled’s own DNA of women supporting women.
Founder Hannah Samano said: “Women’s health has been sidelined for far too long. At Unfabled, we’ve shown that when you truly listen to women, you don’t just create better products – you create a movement. Boots expanding our footprint by over 1000% proves that women’s health is no longer niche. We’re proud to be building a brand, a community, and a category that retailers and investors can no longer ignore.”
Unfabled’s raise reflects continued investor interest in Europe’s women’s health and wellness ecosystem in 2025.
Within this context, Unfabled’s mix of female-led capital, community-powered product development, and rapid retail expansion positions it as one of the UK’s most visible contributors to the next phase of accessible, consumer-focused women’s health innovation.
Rupa Popat, General Partner at Arāya Ventures, added: “Unfabled represents the future of women’s health: community-driven, culturally relevant, and commercially explosive. Hannah has built unparalleled momentum, with DTC growth that has translated directly into retail success. We are thrilled to back her and this brand at such a pivotal stage.”
According to the company, more than 90% of women report experiencing difficult symptoms related to their cycle – from cramps and fatigue to hormonal imbalances – without adequate support.
Funded in 2021 by Hannah Samano, Unfabled was created with the drive to change that. A platform created “by women, for women“, Unfabled is powered by community, data, and lived experience.
Retail chain Boots introduced six of the brand’s Essentials supplements into 50 stores in December 2024. The brand’s performance has now led Boots to expand Unfabled’s footprint by over 1000%, bringing the range to 737 stores nationwide. The brand was handpicked as one of the first entrants into Boots Ignite, the retailer’s accelerator programme for trending and viral brands.
The Unfabled Essentials range include supplements for bloating, cramps, low energy, sleep, and stress, is also proving popular.
At the heart of the brand is Unfabled Labs, a community-led methodology where trends are spotted, tested, and validated before being rapidly translated into products. This model looks to ensure that every supplement Unfabled creates is backed by both science and consumer demand.
